Server Admin Help for Ushahidi instance and Scaling

[Deborah Shaddon]

Currently, an ushahidi server instance is in-use for the Irene Hurricane, and there is some concern about this being able to scale to support the demand that may be required for this event.

My understanding is that it current exists on an Amazon EC2 instance. It's a standard LAMP stack, I do know they have the DB server on a separate instance, but may need to look for more horizontal scaling. In addition, there is currently only one person doing admin for this site as well, so he could use some help over the next week to help with shift-admin support.

Please contact: Aaron Huslage on skype: @huslage

Thanks,
Deborah

[David White]

I'll tweet at Aaron in a second, but I'll put this question out to the group as well:

1) What size is the Application EC2 instance? What size is the DB instance?
-- 1.1) Would we be able to increase these instance sizes if needed?
2) Are we running any metrics on the server - how many visitors, system load, that sort of thing?
3) What is the application, and what is it built upon - PHP?
4) How dynamic is the content? I'm guessing it's changing quite a bit, and quite quickly. Is there anything we can cache?

I'm willing to help monitor things and get some redundancy in place if we want to go that route.

Coming back to my point #4, have we thought about getting Varnish installed, and put it in front of the application server (I'm guessing it's Apache)? If we can do that, then we could launch a 2nd application server, and use Varnish to both do some load balancing and cache as much as possible.

- David

--
- David White -
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